“They enforced,” said he, “the reception of ‘true religion,’—that is, what the rulers regarded as such; and left it optional to learn, or to remain ignorant of, the difference between one religion and another. Even you, it seems, regard it as an intolerable encroachment on liberty to compel a person to learn his letters that he may be able to read the Bible; but you compel him to believe the Bible,—at least to profess his belief, or not openly to deny it. His knowledge of the book may be anything or nothing, just as he pleases; but he is required to acknowledge its divine authority and the correctness of your interpretation of it, or else you treat him as a helot or an alien, and exclude him from civil rights and power. He is not obliged to know whether Jerusalem is in the northern or southern hemisphere, or whether Mahomet lived before or after Christ; but he is obliged, under pain of punishments or civil disabilities, to think with you as to the Jewish, Christian, and Mahometan religions.
“Now this,” he continued, “does seem to us most preposterous. I am not adverting now to its opposition to the principles of justice or of the Christian religion, but to common sense. An injunction which it is completely in the power of the subject to obey, and of the government to enforce, this governments do not issue; and one which the subject may be unable to obey, and which the government cannot fully enforce, that forms an essential part of their enactments; for to acquire a certain humble degree of knowledge (when government provides the means of instruction) is a command which the subject is clearly able to obey. He may, indeed, not think knowledge worth the trouble of study, and may be so brutish as to feel it a hardship not to be allowed to remain in stupid ignorance; but, unless he is a born idiot, he cannot say that it is out of his power to learn anything, or, again, that it is against his conscience to attempt it; nor, on the other hand, can he evade the requisition by pretending to have learnt what he has not, since his proficiency may be ascertained by examination. In the other case, all these circumstances are reversed. A man may be really unable to adopt the same view of religious truth as his rulers; he may feel it a violence to his conscience to profess their belief; and, lastly, he can always, if conscience does not stand in his way, make a false and hypocritical profession of a faith which he does not really hold.
“These governments, therefore, do not interfere where their interference would be, at least, both allowable and effectual—we think beneficial; and where their interference, as we think, is always noxious, but evidently may be both unjust and ineffectual, there they do interfere. Such a ruler, if he teaches his subjects hypocrisy, teaches them at least to be like himself; for his pretended zeal for God’s honour and his people’s welfare must be a mere specious cloak for his desire to uphold his own power in the most effectual and least troublesome way. As for true religion, if he had the least particle of it, or the least conception of its nature, he could not but know that it is a thing which cannot be enforced by law.”
[Much more to the same purpose was urged by Sir Andrew Knox, who, like most of his countrymen, is tinged, as our readers will have perceived, with much of that peculiar habit of thought, derived from the founders of the colony, which many will probably be disposed to regard as eccentric enthusiasm and extravagance. The travellers laid before him, in reply, the arguments commonly employed in Europe (which need not be here repeated) for and against the existing principles of legislation, and the various modifications of these which have been introduced in the several European states.]
On something being said respecting the duty of a Christian ruler to maintain and enforce true religion, and respecting the conduct to be pursued by a Christian community, Sir Andrew observed that, in former times, there appeared to have prevailed among their European ancestors much confusion of thought on those subjects, which did not seem to be even now cleared up, but to be fostered by indistinctness of language.
“Ours,” said he, “are ‘Christian states,’ in the sense that the individual citizens of them are Christians, but not in the sense of our laws enforcing the profession of Christianity, or of any particular religious persuasion. And although, in the sense first specified, our states might be called Christian, the phrase ‘Christian community’ conveys to our minds the idea, not of a state, but of a church; and to blend the two kinds of community into one, so as to give spiritual jurisdiction to the civil magistrate, to maintain religion by secular coercion, and to give those of a particular creed a monopoly of civil privileges and secular offices,—this we consider as changing Christianity into Judaism, and making Christ’s kingdom one ‘of this world,’ which he expressly forbade.”
“But is it not natural, Sir Andrew,” said Mr. Sibthorpe, “that Christians, who have any real veneration for their religion, should wish to exclude from all share of political power in a Christian nation those who are not Christians, or who have depraved and corrupted the Christian faith?”
“Nothing could be more natural,” replied he, “than that the Jewish people, when convinced, as the mass of them at one time were, of his divine mission, should wish to take Jesus and force Him to be their king, so that all who should have disowned his authority, or disobeyed his commands, would have incurred the penalties of treason. Nothing, I say, could be more natural than this; and thence it is that He was so earnest in renouncing all such pretensions, and prohibiting all such attempts: and experience shows how consonant to the character of the ‘natural man’ such a course of procedure has been ever since.
“But the question is not what is agreeable to human nature, but to the divine will. Our Master declared that his kingdom is not a temporal one; and we must not seek to do Him honour by running counter to his commands, so as to make it a kingdom of this world, and, as it were, ‘take Him by force to make Him a king.’ It cannot evince our veneration for Him to mix up religion with politics, when He and his Apostles neither did so nor permitted their followers to do so, though they possessed (what no human rulers can with truth pretend to) one ground of a claim to the right of enforcing true religion by civil penalties and disabilities, viz. the infallible knowledge of what is true religion.
“As for what you were saying of Christ’s kingdom being indeed not of this world, but that, according to prophecy, the kingdoms of the earth are to become the kingdoms of the Lord, this we conceive must be understood of the people themselves becoming Christians; because we conceive that, if it were understood as authorising the state, as a civil community, to enforce and regulate Christianity by the secular sword, then Christ’s kingdom does become a kingdom of this world. To set up a plea founded on a subtle verbal distinction where there is no real difference, reminds one (if I may be pardoned for using so homely an illustration) of the quibbling thief, who contended that he was unjustly charged with having carried off a horse; for that, in truth, it was the horse that had carried off him.